Chapter 47
Logan
“Gosh, aren’t they perfect?” My mother hovers over the tiny, sleeping figures in the bassinets, staring at her newest grandchildren, two girls born within minutes of each other. “And they don’t even need the incubator.”
“Of course they’re perfect. They’re Sarah’s.” Jon leans down to kiss Sarah’s forehead. “You did so good.”
“Babe?”
“Yeah?”
She peers up at him. “You’re never touching me again until you get fixed.”
I burst out laughing.
And that’s how Emery finds us, hugging a bouquet of white daisies against her uniform shirt, the circles under her eyes heavy from lack of sleep.
“They’re letting everyone in, huh?” She eases into the room, sparing my arm a squeeze on her way past before setting the flowers on a table. She peers down at the babies. “Look how tiny they are!” Her smile is genuine, her face awestruck. “Have you named them yet?”
“Yes.” Sarah’s gaze is loving as she regards her twin daughters. “Eden and Lily.”
“They are carbon copies of each other.”
“And here I was, getting used to telling Carson and Brooks apart.” I sigh.
“Maybe you can give them a shovel to play with.” Sarah shoots me a stern look, as if the scar between Carson’s eyes is my fault.
“Don’t worry, we’ll put a little spot of nail polish on one of their toes. Remember, that’s how we could tell the boys apart when they were born.” My mom smiles down adoringly at them. “Aren’t they so cute?”
“Not according to Egan.” Jon chuckles. “He isn’t handling the move from baby of the family to big brother well. He wants us to send them back to wherever they came from.”
Emery laughs, and it’s such a lighthearted sound. It’s nice to hear given all the heaviness in recent days.
“Do you want to hold one?” Sarah asks Emery. “They’re going to wake up to feed any minute, anyway.”
Emery’s eyes light up. “Yes. Give me a sec.” She rushes off to the little bathroom in the private room to wash her hands.
I’m tempted to follow her in, corner her, and ask her what’s going on with Holly’s case.
I’ll never forget the look on Emery’s face when she realized that the Bale House bar owner was the man behind Holly’s disappearance and death.
I thought she was going to collapse from shock at first, but then she kissed me and literally ran to those detectives, and I haven’t seen her since.
Sarah grins at me. “I think someone’s getting baby fever.”
“Don’t start …” I shake my head.
Emery reappears, moving swiftly to collect the sleeping baby on the left.
“That’s Eden,” Sarah notes.
“I remember when Isla was this little.” Emery cradles the tiny body. “It’s funny, when you’re in the thick of it, you want those days to hurry up. But now I wish I could have them back, even for just a little while.”
I watch Emery’s body gently sway left to right as she stares longingly at the bundle, and I’m bowled over by a conflicting swell of anger, regret, hope, and determination.
I wish I could hit rewind and live all those moments with her for the first time, not as a bystander through letters while rotting in a prison cell.
But at least I had that much, thanks to my mother’s unwavering determination to keep me connected.
And as lucky as I feel that Emery’s given me a second chance, at possibly great cost to her, there are moments like right now, when the magnitude of how much I’ve lost hits me and I’m overwhelmed by sadness.
While everyone else is focused on Emery, I catch Sarah staring at me.
“Logan, you should hold her,” she says softly.
Emery’s head snaps up. “What? You haven’t held one of them yet?”
“It’s fine,” I mutter.
“No, it’s not. You’re not missing this.” Emery glides around the bed toward me. “Come on.”
I comply and she carefully transfers the sleeping baby into my arms.
Eden flinches and her eyes open a crack, but then she settles just as quickly.
“See?” Emery’s green eyes shine with emotion as she peers up at me. “You’re a natural.”
Sarah catches my attention by mouthing “baby fever.”
“They’re cute when they sleep, aren’t they?” Jon murmurs, watching us with a secretive smile. “That’s how they get ya.”
“His luck is gonna run out one of these days, I swear.” My father lifts his hat from his head to brush the sweat off his brow before replacing it, our eyes on Mak in the pasture.
The ranch hand moves in with ease, the tagger in his right hand, ready to chip the newborn calf.
The cow bison watches on the other side, but other than a tail swish and a paw against the dirt, she doesn’t react.
“I don’t think it’s luck. That guy is a bison whisperer.” And possibly an adrenaline junkie.
“Maybe you’re right.” Dad pauses. “His ancestors are from the Siksika tribe, out in Alberta.”
“Yeah, Mom wrote me an entire letter about it.” She detailed the First Nation’s entire history with the plains bison and how they revered the animal.
The sound of approaching hooves from the east has both of us turning.
My heartbeat skitters with excitement as I spot Emery riding in on Flapjack at an easy canter. She’s home from work and out of uniform, her lengthy hair flowing freely. She’s been scarce around here as they work overtime to build the case against the Bale House owner.
“Something tells me she’s not coming to see me. I hope it’s good news.” With a salute her way, my dad ambles over to the UTV and continues on his lap to check the fence line.
I can always sense Emery’s mood as readily as rain arrives with the clouds, and now there’s a lightness to her approach, though she looks weary.
“When was the last time you were on a horse?” I call out.
She closes in. “It’s been a few years. Can you tell?”
“Nope.” My hand smooths over Flapjack’s muzzle before reaching for her jean-clad calf, offering her an affectionate squeeze and a playful smirk. “You’ve always been a natural at riding.”
She shakes her head, her cheeks flushing at my double meaning.
“So? What’s new?”
She takes a deep breath and then her expression breaks with a wide smile. “Matt confessed.”
“Seriously?”
She climbs down from the saddle. “He confessed to everything. We have it all on record.” She wears a stunned look that matches how I feel.
I listen quietly as Emery describes in detail everything she’s probably not supposed to tell me—how Matt went out back to grab a quick cigarette that night, only to discover a drunk and emotional Holly waiting for him, upset that he was ignoring her after they’d hooked up a few weeks before and he was now dating a server.
She begged for another chance and, in an effort to calm her down, Matt had sex with her in the back seat of his car.
That genius move didn’t fix his problem.
Holly insisted that Matt sneak her back into his bar.
She refused to leave, sobbing hysterically and threatening to tell Shawna and everyone else what they’d just done.
He needed to get back before someone noticed him gone and came out looking.
She grabbed his arm and when he tugged it free, she lost her balance and fell, hitting her head on a protruding sharp part of the dumpster.
Holly didn’t get up.
Matt panicked. He knew his DNA was all over the fifteen-year-old girl.
So he did the only thing he could think of in that moment to protect himself—he popped his trunk, tossed her body in, and then went back inside, stopping in his office to change his soiled T-shirt while he was at it.
“I still can’t believe I didn’t catch it. Or the fact that I hadn’t seen the Civic in months.”
“Come on. You didn’t suspect him, so why would you notice that? And how many people have viewed the feed and nobody caught that.” I sure as hell wouldn’t have. “Plus, you said he was only gone for nine minutes? How do you do all that in such a short window?”
“She was in a skirt and he was in a rush …” Emery’s voice fades, her face pinching with repulsion. “He wrapped his denim shirt around her to try to stop the bleeding and said he was going to call 911.”
“But he didn’t.”
“No. He threw her in his trunk and then went back inside to serve more drinks and pretend everything was okay.” Emery pauses a beat before she continues.
“But then Matt remembered her phone. And the blood. So, fifteen minutes later, he pretended to need something from his office and went outside again to search Holly’s body and purse for it, then the ground.
He admitted to wiping a rag over the fork pocket where she hit and digging up the blood-soaked gravel, dumping it all into his trunk.
Somewhere in Lake Temagami, there’s a shovel from the Bale House. ”
Emery goes on to describe the other things she started seeing through a different lens as she berates herself for not suspecting Matt from the start—the three glasses he broke, how Shawna struggled to grab his attention several times and he jumped when she touched his shoulder, how he spent less time chatting with customers than usual.
They’re all subtle on their own—until she compared Matt before and after those fateful nine minutes when Holly died.
“She was likely still alive right after she hit her head. That’s what the autopsy showed.
I mean, I doubt they could have saved her, but if he’d called for an ambulance, at least she wouldn’t have died alone in a trunk, stored like a piece of luggage.
” Emery’s eyes well with tears, but she blinks them away.
“Shawna obviously had no clue. When he said he was too tired to spend the night, she didn’t think anything of it. ”
“But he wasn’t going home.”
Emery explains how Matt drove down to the lake, launched the aluminum fishing boat he picked up from home, and slowly made his way out to the deepest part.
In that brief window between pitch-black night and before the sun rose, he dumped Holly’s body overboard, weighing her down by a cinder block he had lying around.
From there he continued to his little island where he hid in his cottage until daylight. He returned to the mainland after nine.
“Are you saying he passed right by us?” I doubt I would have recognized him, had I seen him.
“Maybe. But it’s a big lake. Anyway, he drove back to Cold River, showered, changed, and then hopped into his white pickup and drove to the Bale House for a new day.
Like nothing happened. But then I called about Holly’s phone.
He’d forgotten about it, and he was on his way back there to look again when his kitchen staff found it.
There was nothing he could do to cover that up, no way to plant it under a chair to make it look like she’d forgotten it inside.
” She shakes her head. “I can still hear his voice in my head as he played innocent.”
“What made him confess?” I ask.
She shrugs. “Reality? The fact that he knows his DNA will match what we found on her, and the longer this goes on, the worse it’ll be for him.
Plus, Terry told him that we found his Civic at the scrapyard, still waiting to be crushed, and even though he stripped the carpet from the trunk and dumped cleaners in to remove Holly’s blood, the forensics team has already found traces of it. ”
I frown. “You have his car?”
“No. That’s long gone.” She scoffs. “Terry bluffed, and it worked.”
I frown. “But wait. If the car’s gone, how did you know—”
“Axel Murphy.” Her expression shows the shock that I feel as she tells me about their gas station run-in.
“No shit.”
She shakes her head. “As I live and breathe.”
“Who knew a Murphy could do the right thing after all. And Ian Murphy’s kid, no less.”
“Maybe I’ve had him pegged wrong all this time.”
“I wouldn’t go that far, or you’re bound to be disappointed.”
Her brow furrows with disquiet as she pats Flapjack’s haunches.
“So what does this mean, then?”
“It means we know what happened to Holly and who did it and why. Now it’s all about making sure Matt pays for trying to cover it all up.” Emery sinks into my arms, her gaze on the pasture. “And then we move on. Everyone moves on, however long that takes.”
I smooth the hair off her forehead. “Any word from Dickhead Doug?”
She snorts. “Yeah, he tried to take credit for the investigation in front of his boss, and Terry corrected him, praising me for figuring it out and you for the tip. Doug was not impressed. Hey, is that … Oh my God, look!” Emery points to where the cow lingers, separate from the herd.
Two front legs and a head dangle from its body as she pushes out her baby. “I’ve never actually seen one born.”
“Pretty wild, huh?” I plant a kiss against her head as we watch another bison calf added to the herd.
It’ll be standing within ten to twenty minutes, walking after its mother not long after that, and it will graze and grow as we quietly linger in the background.
I’m beginning to see why everyone around here makes a big deal about spring.
It really does feel like a fresh start with new beginnings.